


The Life and Times of Mr. Mark Outsider, Lately of Karnaca

by alexandraerin



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Crack Fic, Crack Treated Seriously, Fuck Kirin Jindosh In Particular, Gen, Human Outsider (Dishonored), Technology marches on
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:28:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26719036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexandraerin/pseuds/alexandraerin
Summary: Several months after the ending of Death of the Outsider, a timeless young man finds himself alone on the streets of Karnaca, where he gets in on the ground floor of a new revolution in personal locomotion.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	1. The Grand Inventor's Daughter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Moofable](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moofable/gifts), [dynamicsymmetry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/gifts).



> This story began as an in-joke from my partner, [Moofable](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moofable/), which grew into a tweet referencing Mr. Mark Outsider running a business called Mark's Mopeds, mainly because "moped" is a slightly funny word that was just anachronistic enough to be funnier and also begins with M. It's grown into a tongue-in-cheek look at the post-canon world of the Dishonored Trilogy, though there may be some actual insight into the world and character slipping in like void energy through a hollow.

A man who had once been nothing and had become everything stood alone in a crowd on the streets of Karnaca.

It was strange to be in the great southern city. It was strange to be anywhere in particular. For thousands of years, he had been nowhere and everywhere, but never really anywhere, and now he was _somewhere_. Now his lungs drank in air and the scents of the city as he himself drunk in water, and if he ever stopped doing either of those things for long it would either kill him or be because he was dead, and that was kind of bullshit, when you got right down to it.

But after four thousand years of observing all of the bullshit of humanity, the bullshit of mortality was a welcome change of pace.

Sometimes.

His name had been returned to him, and with it, his life. Not the life he'd lived long ago, as an outcast beggar boy and not even a really good beggar, but his state of being a living being. He had not spoken his name aloud, had not heard it even from his own lips since that moment when what was left of the assassin Daud had whispered it into his ear in the void.

Billie had not asked for his name and he had not offered it to her. He had given her eldritch gifts from the void without her asking, once before. It had been... necessary, but he hadn't felt good about it. She was the only person alive who knew who he was, who knew what he had been. 

Was she alive? He felt certain she must be, he couldn't imagine her surviving all that she had only to die some random, ignominious death a few months later, but he didn't know. 

That was the strangest part, not knowing. Not knowing anything. Not knowing everything. Being able to wonder not about possible futures but unknown presents.

He had not actually been able to see everything, not all at once, not in a way his not-quite-mortal mind could take in, but once upon a timelessness if he had wondered if she lived or not, the mere act of thinking about it would have turned his attention to her physical form and the strands of fate that swirled around her, and he would have known. The only questions worth asking were of what people _would do_ , and the answers to those questions were rarely surprising if he did not get personally involved, and even then the great masses of people would simply disappoint him by doing the most obvious thing.

Life as a mortal was full of surprises. Sometimes he even surprised himself.

Today he was surprised to see a poster plastered against the inside of a shining storefront window, a reproduction of a silvergraph image of some kind of personal conveyance with a pair of small wheels at the front and the back, much like a velocipede but with a small motor attached. 

That part wasn't surprising. The humans -- _us_ humans -- could hardly see anything these days without motorizing it. He had long since ceased to be surprised at the things people -- other people -- would stick their dicks inside. He had been well on his way to no longer being surprised when they stuck an engine inside something. Such was the way of the world.

What surprised him was the legend atop the poster which proclaimed it "The Latest Jindosh Creation!" Those were not words he had expected to read soon, or possibly at any time.

The Gristolan doors of the fine shop stood open, and the man who had been a god who had been a man stepped through them. Inside there were several models of the motorized personal conveyance advertised on the outside, some of which shared the profile of a velocipede but one which caught his eye in particular was more like a running board with a pair of handlebars sticking out from the front of it. The front was covered with exquisitely inlaid wooden panels much like those that had protected Jindosh's clockwork army. 

There could be no mistaking its provenance. This was the work of the grand inventor of Serkonos.

"Could it be?" he said, reaching out and stroking the shiny amber carapace of the strangely insectile machine. "Has the great Kirin Jindosh at last recovered his wits? The last I saw him, he was struggling to make a star chart out of elbow pasta and glitter glue."

"Yes, I have several of his works on my wall," a young woman said, striding into the showroom atop high-heeled boots. "He always did dream of surpassing Sokolov. Maybe with the right encouragement, he'll grow into a great artist. Hi, I'm Becky Jindosh, Kirin's daughter. I've taken over the family business in his stead, owing to his infirmity that I see you're already well-acquainted with, though we do _try_ to keep the full extent of it within the family."

"Hang on," the one who had been the Outsider said. "I happen to know for a fact that Kirin Jindosh had no children. He had few personal relationships of any kind, and always said he didn't have time for..."

"...all of that messy business, I know," Becky said. "You're right, he didn't have children. Not until about five months ago, when I stumbled across a cave not far from his clockwork mansion. Inside was an enormous vault protected by a mechanical lock and a riddle. Jindosh's voice played and said, 'On a hunting expedition, I awoke at my camp and walked one mile south, then one mile east, and one mile north back to my camp, where I found and shot a bear. What color was the bear?' The answer was white."

"Ah, of course!" he said. "The only place -- well, the only _normal_ place -- on the earth that could happen was the north pole and the only bears that live anywhere near it are the ice bears."

"Oh, is that the solution?" Becky said. "See, the dial only had six colors on it and the others were blue, purple, green, orange, and red. I thought there might be red bears in Pandyssia so that was going to be my second guess, but honestly, I would have just tried all six. In fact, the dial had been left in the position before white. Don't remember the order, but literally the first person who came across the vault would have 'solved' it, every time. When it opened, another audiograph played and explained how he wanted to have an heir but couldn't be bothered to get one, much less raise and educate them, so he had created this vault as a test that only the most brilliant thinker of the generation after his could solve. Inside was everything I needed to 'prove' my bloodline, including a device to imitate his voice and a mostly complete audiograph will that identified a not-yet-specified person as his sole heir. I specified myself as 'Rebecca Jindosh, previously known for her own safety as Rebecca Wagoner' and then since I could make his voice say whatever I wanted, I also added a coda at the end about the direction of the company if he should find himself indisposed and a couple of vague allusions to secrets he knew about the board of directors and various powerful nobles that he had recorded to be automatically released if anything should happen to him, his company, or his heir, followed by an almost off-mic aside about why he would even bother when the clockwork assassins have enough whale oil to last a hundred years, and a hurried realization that the audiograph was still on and a note to have that last bit clipped. I dated it to just slightly before his accident to explain the inclusion of the 'accidental' bit, but I don't think anyone in the boardroom was listening to me when I apologized. They've all been listening very attentively since then."

"I don't know why you're telling me all this."

"I don't know why I'm telling you it, either," Becky said. "Except that I haven't told _anybody_ it, and I can't, ever, and I've felt like I was going to burst. Maybe I'll regret having told you, but you sound like somebody who knew him and had few illusions about him, and anyway, I guess you just have that kind of face. Weirdly familiar, like I've seen it before in my dreams. And also I just feel like I can trust you. That's probably foolish of me. Has anybody ever told you that you have kind eyes?"

"People have told me that I kind of have eyes. That seems similar."

"You're a very strange man."

"That one I have heard."

"What's your name?"

"...Mark," he said, after a pause.

"How do you spell that?"

"In a language long dead, and now lost forevermore to the living."

"...I meant more with a C or a K."

"I think with an M, actually," he said.

"Well, Mark with an M," Becky said. "Are you interested in buying a scooter?"

"Oh, I don't have any money," he said. Billie had given him what she had called his share of the loot from her last big caper, silently acknowledging his material support and role in the planning process, and he had been living off of that. 

"...figures."

"I have been figuring out what to do about that," he said. "And it seems like the thing to do is get a job. I'm not in a position to buy any of your scooters, but I might be interested in selling them."


	2. A Possibility of Cider

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Becky Jindosh thinks she's found a kindred spirit in Mark and invites him into her business. Mark mulls over the possibilities of Gristol cider.

"Let's go to my office," Becky said, leading Mark through to a staircase at the back of the shop. "Benecio, I will be speaking to Mr....:"

"Mark is fine," he said. "It's been a long time since I've been known by anything else."

"Well, I'll be speaking to this gentleman upstairs for a bit."

"Yes, Ms. Jindosh," a man with a youthful but weathered face and a smart suit replied. Mark recognized him, of course, but found he recalled nothing about him, which he had come to see as a generally good sign when dealing with people.

Like most shops, the backrooms were completely open and the stairs connecting to the apartment space above were, too. Mark couldn't help but think about the poor security of the arrangement, but he'd also seen what became of those souls who sought to close everything off with locks and traps. When faced with someone sufficiently motivated, such precautions ultimately availed them little... but for every such harried soul that had entered the void at the point of an assassin's blade, far, far many went meekly into the great nothing after a wasted life spent starting at shadows and jumping at small noises.

Maybe it wasn't such a brutal world, so much as a world with brutality in it. Most people who lived in it could have windows that opened and not invite death inside. Most people could still find some time to dance in the sun.

The upper floor of the shop was very open. It might have been two or three separate apartments at one point. Now it was divided into office space, general storage, and a small workshop. There was still most of the remains of a kitchen, which Becky had converted to a bar. She went to this now.

"What can I get you?" she asked him.

Mark found that he preferred this question to the other way it was usually asked, which was, "Would you like something to drink?" 

Would he? 

Probably, but he didn't know. 

The worst version of the question was, "What would you like to drink?"

His senses when he'd been a god had been... different. Vast and diffuse. He couldn't eat or drink, not really. Oh, he could manifest himself physically and take a big theatrical swig of whiskey or a bite of an apple, but it all tasted like ash in his mouth. Not _just_ ash. He would taste the grain that the whiskey had been, and the dirt it had been planted in. He could taste the crops burned or gone to seed. He could taste the bread they might have become. He could taste every form of rot and wilt and fungus and pestilence that might have grown on it. The apple, ripe and juicy. The apple, full of worms.

And it wasn't so much tasting, it wasn't a collection of texture, taste, and smell... it was knowledge. Knowledge of all the finite and overlapping but uncountable possibilities. The knowledge of what it could have tasted like, could have smelled like. In the void, he had not experienced things... he had known them.

It was why he had fixated so much on people, on particular people and the extremes of what they experienced. He couldn't experience any singular thing but he could enjoy when other people did.

"Gristol cider," he said, still thinking about apples. "If you have it."

"You have expensive tastes."

"Do I?" He'd never considered Old Pattie's to be a posh drink. He'd certainly seen enough bottles lying in gutters, put to interesting and clever uses.

"We're far from Gristol's shores. Are you from there?"

"I was actually born... well, not terribly far from here, in a place you're unlikely to have heard of. I'm sorry, I'm not used to thinking about the costs of things."

"An impoverished patrician," she said.

"It is true I am much diminished from my former status," Mark said. "But I'm not used to thinking about money because I'm not used to having any. I've seen all the trappings of wealth the world has to offer, but I've never possessed them. I've never actually tasted Gristol cider, and I suppose I was curious. If you'd prefer, I'll drink anything. Water is fine."

"In this neighborhood? Yeah, here, the water is fine," she said. "I'm not used to having money, either... or not having it for long. And I may not have it long enough to get used to it. The thing is, I don't know how long I can keep Kirin's company... the family business... clanking along, but sharing a glass of imported cider with another grown-up street urchin is not going to be what causes the downfall." She poured some into a cut-glass tumbler and handed it to him. "Anyway, knowing I might lose my fortune is helping me enjoy it more. Or that's what I tell myself."

Mark lifted the glass to his face and took in the sweet, sharp floral aroma of it, which was quickly obliterated by the cutting spirit bite. For the moment, he savored the possibilities it represented rather than tasting it. What would it taste like? He didn't know. He could wonder, and that was wonderful.

"You look like a real connoisseur," Becky said. "The first time I ever got my hands on a loaf of good bread, I hadn't had more than scraps in days, and I tore it apart and shoved into my mouth without tasting it. I ate so fast..."

"You threw it up," Mark said, remembering. _Becky Wagoner, with her rusty red curls tucked up into her father's checkered cap. They'd called her Checks. She'd fallen asleep holding that hat tightly, so no one could steal it. The one boy who'd tried, she'd thought she killed, but she hadn't. She'd only killed one person in her life, and never known it, but she blamed herself for a death that hadn't happened. Even after that, she had always believed she would do anything to keep that hat, but still regretted what she'd thought she'd done, and wasn't that a little bit interesting?_ "Ate yourself sick and then couldn't run..." _And the guard had caught her long enough to give her a wallop and try to drag her in for stealing, and the bread wasn't even stolen..._ it was funny, the things he could remember.

Well, not _funny_ -funny.

"Yeah," she said. "Predictable, huh? I bet you've probably got a story like that, too, that taught you to savor a thing _."_

"I've certainly learned how to appreciate things while they last. But, is your situation so precarious? It sounded like you have the company board well in hand."

"They aren't the only stakeholders, though, and you can only corral so many people with vague threats before, statistically, one of them doesn't care enough, and it really only takes one to embolden the rest. The thing is that Jindosh... Kirin... my father... really was brilliant in some regards. He was brilliant at taking other people's ideas and patching them together into his own 'creations'. I'm learning his only real irreplaceable genius was in the area of giving machines some semblance of thought. Any reasonably talented mechanist could have made something like the mechanical form of his soldiers, but they would have required a human being to pilot or direct it. Which honestly probably would work better, but that would have required him to trust people, rely on people. No one is still quite sure how he did it. His early efforts... well, they were apparently strange and they had a tendency to break people. I shut down the lab that was trying to replicate his experiments."

"That... is probably wise," Mark said.

"Where he was considerably less gifted was as a businessman. I mean, his big idea was to create something so valuable that almost nobody could afford it. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad there aren't even more clockwork soldiers and guards still out there somewhere. I'm planning on issuing a recall for the rest but given who the buyers were, there's no way to enforce it. I'll probably be helped by the sheer number of people who have been killed by their own rewired or sabotaged units, or by one that simply encountered reduced visibility... I mean, he programmed them to kill _everybody_ if they could not distinguish friend from foe. If dear old Dad hadn't suffered his, you know... accident... I think it was only a matter of time before one of them took off his head."

"Is that what you call it? An accident?"

"I don't know what to call it. I don't know what happened. It doesn't like anyone does. It would be better if I had some explanation for the investors. You seem acquainted with his condition. What would you say happened?"

"Well, I'm no physician." An idea occurred to him. "Perhaps you should consult one?"

"I've asked a few, but it's tricky. I mean, it wouldn't do for one to find evidence of foul play, or worse... a cure."

"Perhaps you should write to Anton Sokolov," Mark said. "The man has so many talents it's probably easy to forget he was the Royal Physician."

"After he cured the Pandyssian rat plague?"

"Ah, I suppose that would stand out."

"Anyway, doesn't Sokolov hate Ji... my father?"

"More than you could ever know," Mark said. "But I have to imagine that under the circumstances, he might be moved to... feel something... by the plight of his former pupil and provide you with a diagnosis and course of treatment you would find amenable."

"Do you... do you know Sokolov?" 

"I've never met the man. But he did use to... correspond with me... frequently. He sought my favor obsessively, in fact. I found his messages florid and overwrought, and more than a little bit presumptuous, and so I never got around to replying. I don't think it would help your case to mention me."

"I think I'm beginning to get a picture of who you are," Becky said. "Or were. You seem unusually discerning. I'd think most courtesans would have jumped at the chance for his patronage."

"Fewer than you might think, once word got around about his tastes in his youth," Mark said. "A great man is not always a good man. Rarely, even. It's always so surprising to find one who is. And Anton Sokolov was never surprising."

"Do you think you could overcome your distaste enough to help draft a letter?" Becky asked. "Because I'm getting the sense you know the angles I should be working here better than I do."

"I suppose that I do at that," Mark said. "And it would have to be done delicately. If he saw a chance for a private joke on Jindosh, he'd leap on it with both feet, but if he thought he was being threatened or blackmailed... well, I think only one man alive could ever threaten Sokolov and have it work. From anyone else, he would become intractable, and he retains the affections of some very powerful people."

"Yeah, he tutored the empress, didn't he?"

"Hmm? Oh, yes, she's also the empress, isn't she?" Mark said. "That was honestly the least interesting part of the whole drama for me. But yes, if sweet little Emily Kaldwin thought that Jindosh's heir was disturbing dear Anton in his comfortable retirement, I think it would go very poorly for you."

"For us," Becky said. "Since I've taken you into my confidences... or dumped them out in a heap at your feet... and since you seem to have a strange understanding of my problems, I'm just going to say that you've got the job, if you want it. Getting back to that: so Kirin... father..."

"If I may presume? It would not be unusual for you to refer to your father by his first name, given that he did not raise you. You will be better served by speaking of him the way that comes naturally then by constantly tripping over that inclination. Even Emily calls her father by his name as often as not."

"Just how exclusive was your clientele?" 

"Very select. I bestowed my favors on nobody I did not wish to see more of."

"And yet you never had any money for yourself," Becky said. "There is no justice in this world."

"Generally, no. But like a good, great man, it's always interesting when one stumbles across some."

"Well, if you're sure you can get Sokolov to get the investors off my back about Kirin, then we can move on to the next problem: selling those damned contraptions downstairs. I know that our market needs to be bigger than the king of Morley and the three richest families in Gristol if two of them pool their money, but I'm not yet sure who the market is. When I created the first Jindosh Personal Conveyance..."

"You invented them?"

"I said I created them," she said. "I don't want to turn into my father, ha... taking credit for everything. He had plans for a wheeled version of his soldiers that would be better at chasing down targets, and I took some elements from them and some from the rail carriages, and bought a small family workshop that was working on an improved bicycle and put them to work combining them, with a bit of that baroque Jindosh flavor. Anyway, my idea was to make something that would let people get around the streets faster or travel the roads without needing all the space and complications of horses or railways. Something you could keep in a corner in an apartment or a stairwell of a house, something for the people who don't have carriage houses or servants. But they're still too expensive for the average person. There's some room to make them cheaper, but the Jindosh name is already in the gutter and the investors are already nervous. I can't move too far, too fast in that direction."

"When Kirin wanted to sell the public on a new idea, he would create a spectacle," Mark said. "And the spectacle would be a sensation, and then every noble family and wealthy merchant would want in on that sensation, and the fact that most of them couldn't would make them want it all the more. Now, you don't want to sell to the rich. The poor don't have any money, certainly not enough to gamble on a new thing."

"Who does that leave?"

"What if instead of selling one bike or scooter to each rich person, you found someone who could afford several of them? Possibly dozens."

"It's a _personal_ conveyance, Mark. You can only ride one at a time. I mean, I guess we could do them up in different colors and try to sell them like fans or gloves or umbrellas, accessories for every season and occasion, but that's still hoarding the technology. I want my creation to change the lives of working people."

"And you will, if you can sell first to the companies they work for," Mark said. "How many businesses on this street alone employ runners? Florists, pharmacies, grocers. They could all use one. Make their deliveries faster, make more sales. Offer a novelty to their customers that their competitors can't match... until they buy one, too. But that's small thinking. Start with the courier companies. Start with the messenger services. The newspapers. Anybody who deals with citywide distribution and deliveries. You can afford to offer a bulk discount for the ones who are willing to get in on the ground floor. Even selling at cost, the advertising value -- the spectacle -- would be priceless. Because in one stroke, your creation would be everywhere. Overnight, the first company you sell to would have an edge that its competitors can't ignore. And all the small shops would want in on it, too. Nobles wouldn't flock to anything that lets them go anywhere in the city because they don't want to go anywhere in the city, alone and in the open, but they'll buy them, too, for their servants and errand-runners."

"We scale up production to meet demand and the cost comes down, and I can start introducing more reasonable versions with the argument that we're leaving money on the table and if we don't capture every market while we have the advantage then someone else will," Becky said. "Which is true, just as it's true that Kirin was a terrible businessman and his snobbery cost his investors dearly, but right now I'm nobody from nowhere and I need a _big_ success to prove myself before I start saying anything that no one else has dared to say yet. This... this sounds like it could work, Mark. When you lay it all out like that, it's so obvious. Get the business market first. It's not how Kirin would have done it. He'd have created his own courier service and tried to get everybody else to use it, and then it would just be one company with much higher overhead than the others, scrambling for a piece of the delivery business. But we could sample from the entire bakery case instead of fighting over a piece of the pie. Why did I not see that?"

"I think it's a matter of perspective. You've been too close to the problem, trying to see your way out from the inside."

"I guess I should have taken an outsider into my confidence earlier."

"An outsider, yes," Mark said. "That is definitely me. Indefinitely. The indefinite article. An indefinite article. An outsider, one of many people who are generally on the outside of things."

"Relax," Becky said. "You're very tightly-wound, aren't you? I already said you have the job. Have some of that cider."

He did.

"Hmm."

"How does it taste?"

"Less like apples than I would have expected," he said. 

"Sorry it didn't meet your expectations."

"Expectations can be a sort of a prison," Mark said. "I find I still enjoy being surprised more often than not. I wonder how long that will last?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oof. This all started off as a joke but it turns out I might have some things to say? I've had this Becky Jindosh for one day and if anything happened to her I would drop-assassinate everybody in the room and then myself.


End file.
